By Companies are welcoming employees back to offices after the pandemic. But employees are often resisting this shift because they have adjusted to remote working over the last 2 years.
Amidst this scenario, hiring managers will have to apply out-of-box strategies for managing remote employees. This will help them understand their current top-performing employees’ mindsets and expectations from the firm.
Managers and HRs can later persuade employees to bring back the old normal by streamlining that process. Till then, HRs have to continuously act smart and tackle everyday remote employees’ challenges.
6 Strategies For Managing Remote Employees Are:
1. Make employees feel they’re part of the team.
Remote working can be too distant and elusive if managers fail to nurture their employees on time. To curb their anxieties while working from home or other locations, HRs can use features like Social Intranet available at uKnowva.
With these features, HRs can increasingly motivate employees to engage with their teams and peers. Their work location would not matter.
Instead, what would count is each employees’ calculative effort in putting their point forward to finish their daily deliverables. Regularly exercising this behaviour connects employees digitally; they then feel less distant.
Conclusively, top-performing employees love to acknowledge the latest happenings in the firm through the dashboard, news feed, live events, and uploaded posts.
This becomes a substitute to the old normal amidst the post-pandemic era. So, they know their likes, comments, and opinions are being listened to, acted upon, and shared ahead.
2. Provide employees with the right technology and other tools.
To tackle remote employees’ issues, managers should provide them with justified technology and tool kits. Employees working from a remote location can then perform their deliverables without hindrances.
Their work will be on time. HRs and their team leaders can double-check their progress/performance reports on the remote employee monitoring software.
This strategy helps streamline the efficiency expected from remote employees if the work-from-office is not favoured. So, employees must have access to on-cloud software like uKnowva HRMS. It guarantees 99.99% of the server’s uptime.
That’s one of the basic needs for employees to mark their attendances in the Virtual Biometric system along with their project details.
3. Help employees set periodical goals.
Setting smart goals is one amongst many other effective strategies for managing remote employees. After setting predefined goals with deadlines, remote employees are at ease. They don’t need micromanaging as much thereafter.
Their team leaders should educate them once on setting their periodic (daily, weekly, or monthly) goals in the remote employee monitoring software. Then it’s up to employees working from offshore locations to comply with the deadlines.
After all, their performance appraisal reports and the yearly hike is closely associated with these deliverables they accomplish. This statement should be communicated to all workers: remote or in-house. Then, they would act responsibly to fulfil their daily KPIs on time.
4. Initiate open and respectful internal communication.
Remote employees’ engagement is another factor that managers need to look after. Because if employees fail to contribute and engage, there’s no way to know the effectiveness of their performances.
There has to be a constant point of contact for employees to stay in touch with the organisation and peers. So, HRs can streamline an open communication channel by using a Social Intranet network.
They should empower remote workers and other employees to connect via posts, polls, surveys, and forums. This strategy enables employees to get to know each other from distant locations.
There could be midweek meetings with team members or monthly meetings to reward top-performing employees. These strategies boost overall employee engagement and workers’ growth expectations during their tenure in the firm.
5. Hire right from day one.
Amongst the 6 strategies for managing remote employees in this blog post, this one is quite impactful. If the onboarding isn’t optimised, an unfit employee on a remote location can misuse company resources: tech, tools, cost, and time.
Avoiding this scenario is possible if the recruitment engine optimises the entire application cycle. For that, HRs can take the help of automated HRMS software.
Using those tools, time invested in parsing CVs reduces, leaving almost no scope for human errors: bias, negligence, or manipulation. Ultimately, when HRs hire the right candidate for the job opening, it benefits everyone.
Remote workers shall be oriented well with the company policy, rules, and regulations. Similarly, HRs must know what such a remote worker expects from the organisation.
If these equations are on the same front, hiring is effective from day one. Further, employee monitoring software aids HRs to familiarise new hirers and increase their engagement as an integral part of their KPIs.
6. Emphasise on employees’ wellbeing scores.
Working in a hybrid culture isn’t easy for remote working employees. Often, they feel left out while working from their homes or other remote locations. With work pressure, they can stop engaging with teams abruptly.
This could impact their mental health and wellbeing to the point that their efficiency rate drops beyond the firm’s expectations.
In such a case, HRs need to ensure that everything is going according to the KPIs set for these employees. But the burden should be equally divided between teams. To double-check, remote working software helps employees to check in and check out with their mood index.
Studying the insights from these daily check-ins and check-outs, HRs know whether their remote workers are happy or not. If there is any fluctuation in the mood, they should immediately take corrective measures.
These strategies can involve:
- Having a direct talk with the team member,
- Reducing their burden, or
- Boosting their morale with team-building exercises.
Conclusion:
It’s apparent that hybrid and remote working cultures will stay longer than expected. But it does not stop HR’s duty to manage, develop, and engage with their employees regularly.
Instead, the above-discussed strategies for managing remote employees are even more important now. By applying them, HRs attain an estimated retention rate, employee engagement and satisfaction scores in a given period.
Besides that, there are software-as-a-service tools to automate and streamline mundane tasks. Using them, remote workers feel less burdened and more focused on their key performance indicators to accomplish.
